Hollywood has an unspoken, but hard-and-fast rule: Never kill the dog.

This was something Martin McDonagh learned when studio heads read his script for Seven Psychopaths. In a script filled with human carnage, he was asked to remove a single scene: The death of a dog.

Are you like us – one of those people who want to know in advance if a dog is killed or hurt in a move before you see the movie? We’re not alone. There are so many people like us that a website was created, Does the Dog Die? that lets movie-goers know ahead of time the fate of a dog in the plot.

It gets worse. Few of us will admit to feeling worse about the death of a dog in a situation where scores of people died, but many of us do. A Northeastern University study tracked people’s reactions to fake news stories about beatings that happened to either dogs, puppies, human adults, or human babies, and according to the study, adult human victims got less empathy than did children and dogs. The conclusion of the study was that it’s not the difference between human and animals. It’s the innocence of the victim, and while humans can speak for themselves, kids and dogs are helpless.

During the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, some 40,000 people were executed or murdered, and more died in prison or in war, but it was the rounding up of the aristocratically-owned toy spaniels, terriers and hounds who where then burned alive en masse for “a crime that morality prevents us from naming” that haunts many of us. When the Romanov family was executed during the Russian Revolution, some express more pity for the Japanese Spaniel, “Jimmy” (also written “Chinny”) who was killed with a rifle butt blow to the head than for the family.  Maybe some of us need to become more emotionally evolved. Maybe some of us already are. We can’t explain human nature. We just know that, “You never kill the dog.”

Image of Queen Alexandra with her Japanese Chin